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How Red Hat Hires
New submitter markfeffer, Senior Editor at Dice, writes "Red Hat's hired about 600 people in its last three fiscal quarters, and it's going to keep hiring – about 900 to 1,000 more this year. The company's primarily looking for software and technical support engineers, along with salespeople who can help strengthen its cloud-technology capabilities. They want people with strong technical skills, of course, but the company puts a premium on those who've taken the time to research its business and send in a resume that's custom-tailored to the job opening."
Love this ad by Dice/Red Hat in an attempt to attract talent. I mean, I sure hope it's an ad, because if it's a legit bit of "news" then slashdot's standards have really fallen.
As someone who's been involved in various stages of the hiring process, my question is, does it work?
I have been involved in hiring hundreds of people, at several different companies, and I have found that idiosyncratic hiring practices rarely help. It is much better to follow the KISS principle:
1. Screen the resumes and pick the top 10%
2. Email them and set up a phone call.
3. Chat for a few minutes, and if you like them, set up a face-to-face interview.
4. If you like them at the interview, and they can demonstrate competence, then offer them a job at the end of the interview.
I have worked for companies that did much more elaborate interviewing, including multiple interviews, lunch meetings, etc. We seldom changed our opinions after the first interview, it was time consuming, and the candidate pool was shrinking as the best people were accepting jobs elsewhere.
If you are looking for some job, any job, this attitude may make some sense. Say, because you are unemployed or because you are truly miserable in your current position. Even with a pretty crummy employment market at the moment, this is not most people.
If you are looking for a next position, say because you have a big life change coming, want career advancement, or just plain feel like it's time for a change, this doesn't make sense at all. Spewing uncountable copies of your resume to the four winds and hoping might land you a job. If so, my guess is at some company you have no connection to, no passion for, and likely no reason but the pay check to keep going. This is not a recipe for happiness OR success in the new job.
I frankly can't imagine being willing to leave my current position for another one unless it was more than sufficiently exciting to justify customizing a resume and cover letter. Heck, the last time I did that it was for an internal transfer. Probably the next time, too. Red Hat is an excellent fit for me. Of course, I also find the whole idea of finding jobs through any form of job add rather improbable. I've literally never been hired for a job that I had seen an add for before I had talked with the hiring manager. Do people really get jobs that way in statistically significant numbers?
Having worked at Red Hat in 2 different departments, I can certainly say that this article is 100% bullshit.
Last line in the article:
"In essence, Red Hat wants to know that you’re going to make a commitment to the job, not simply get a bit of experience and jump somewhere else
Dice News in Tech"
RedHat takes full advantage of it's brand to sucker and lure unsuspecting and gullible people into working long hours for low pay. Everyone is overworked at the low to mid levels, management is dysfunctional, and voicing your own "ideas" is a frowned upon form of insubordination that is likely to get you blacklisted/fired.
If you want to form a real opinion about the worklife there without a bunch of marketing nonsense, take a look through the reviews on glassdoor.com: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Red-Hat-Reviews-E8868.htm
"Come on, who doesn't want individual audio level settings for each program?"
Me. WTF do I need that for? My system sounds just fine, always has although audio is rarely used. Mostly just in connection with multimedia apps, and the login screen.
The point is that PA allows unobtrusive audio clues, like a gentle "ding ding" 10 minutes before an appointment, even though you are listening to fairly loud music. I like the fact the sound levels in VLC and Amarok is different from the rest of the system.
Before PA there wasn't a functional sound daemon, so everybody just turned off any sound notifications and manually set the sound level to zero to avoid a sudden blast of noise when accidental starting a web commercial, or when "System Bell" gave a extremely loud warning "DING!" just because you had been listening to load music earlier that day.
Not talking about the problems with running sound i Dosbox, or using two apps with sound at the same time, bluetooth sound, etc. PA solved all those problems, it just works and makes life easier for developers, distro makers and end users, which is the reason why all major Linux distributions have converted to it.
People trash talk PA, but it just that, trash talk, without technical argumentation, without any alternative to the many features that PA gives, and without regard to the fact that PA works well in the real world.
That's it.
ALSA did everything I needed for years, and ESD/OSS before that. As a user I really don't give a rat's ass how the code looks behind it all, as long as it works, which it did.
As far as SysVinit, same idea - it worked, and worked very well for decades. I still have no use for fast booting since I rarely if ever reboot. And I fail to see what other use there is for tinkering with something that worked just fine - I liked the old scripts since they were very self-documenting and easily modifiable.
So, no. Keep it.
SystemD goes way, way beyond the wish of faster booting. It really is a Sysadmins dream come true when it comes to controlling the many services (not just daemons) that runs on modern Linux systems. "systemctl" is just a natural, UNIX like way of controlling all these services from the command line or in scripting. "init/Sys V" was perhaps a fitting system for the needs of Unix boxes in the 1980's, but modern day servers and desktop systems have other needs, and init scripts are complicated, messy and fragile to edit. SystemD is just so coherent and natural to use, and allows far superior ways of maintaining, configuring, and monitoring systems.
I think your main problem is, that make your own way of using your system, a baseline for everybody else. You may not use sound very much, but many people actually do, you probably don't use bluetooth sound on your system, but many Linux devices, like smartphones do, you may not have the need to tweak init scripts, or administrating or monitoring services on a server, but other people do.